![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tahnanI'm With the Band
OK, but what are you?
I'm a picker, I'm a grinner, I'm a lover, and I'm an answer checker.
dougoFor the past five years, I've seen every single Oscar-nominated film before the Academy Awards ceremony. This is my third year officially competing in the Oscars Death Race, but sadly this was my worst showing: I saw the 50th film on March 5th, putting me in 176th place on Death Race Tracking. (171st place on Oscars Death Race, which I guess has a slightly different set of users.) I suspect this is partly because there are a lot more racers than last year, but also Sirāt didn't arrive in local theaters until that week, and I prefer not to pirate feature films (I did get ahold of one of the doc shorts because I had seen all the others streaming and the doc shorts collection didn't have any convenient showings). Anyway, the goal is just to finish, and I shouldn't care much about leaderboard placement. Right??
So yeah, here is my annual post about what I would have voted for on my Oscar ballot, if I had been eligible to vote in every branch of the Academy. In other words, these are not my predictions (though I also did those on the ESPN Oscars Pick'em site). A number in parentheses is my rating for that movie (our of 10). Sorry, no time left to write up more thoughts other than the rankings! Enjoy the awards ceremony!
tahnanNot my best clue phrase (and honestly there was a better choice available for the prompt), but here we are.
Arroyos
The answer is four letters.
An earlier version of this puzzle misspelled "Helland". The error has been corrected.
Take me to the answer checker, dip me in the water, washing me down, washing me down
dougoTen years ago, I started a tradition of writing up my thoughts about the Best Picture Oscar nominees; this year, for the first time, I had already seen all ten nominees by the time they were announced! This was certainly a surprise, because I hadn't yet seen No Other Choice and I had fully expected it to get a nomination, but no dice for that. The nomination ceremony was almost two months ago, and I probably should have written these up back then, but I was busy finishing The MIT Mystery Hunt and then after that I got busy finishing my Oscars Death Race (and a few other races). But the awards ceremony is tomorrow so time is getting short!
According to tradition, these are in the order that I saw them:
( Read more... )(See also last year's thoughts.)
![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceHappy Saturday!
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
tahnanMysteries of the Ancients
What better time than '26 to look back?
Did you know our distant ancestors also had answer checkers? BUILT BY ALIENS?
fauxkloretahnanGetting slightly ahead of the every-two-days pace, here's...it seemed like a good idea when I started, and by the eighth or ninth clue I started really, really hating it. Here's hoping it's better than I think.
It seemed like for the entire first half of my cross-country drive, I couldn't get anything on the radio except very staticky station identification. At least I got some recommendations for the second half?
We're giving away tickets to the first five callers, so get your answers ready and call 'em in!
denise posting in dw_advocacytahnanI thought it would be much easier to make a crossword grid in HTML than it turned out to be. Maybe if I had access to CSS files instead of having to jam "background-color:black" into every "td" tag? Well, whatever.
You can also use the grid from 7xwords on September 16 but it'll think you got all the answers wrong.
ACROSS
DOWN
Sounds like you want to check your answer here.
fauxkloretahnanYup, averaging about a puzzle every two days. Sounds right.
Welcome, new hire! We're starting you out with an easy little cleanup job. Building's over there--just gather up the letters at the start, feel free to drop anything in the recycling bin before you enter, and just go through and clean up all of the stray letters in the rooms There's a bin in each one, where you can drop any letter you don't need, and it'll get upcycled into a brand-new letter.
Of course, you'll want to make sure when you enter a room that the word you're carrying fits that room's category. So don't try just running straight through and shoving everything into bins willy-nilly; you'll need to plot out a path.
I'll see you when you come out in the southeast corner, where you can drop whatever word you've got onto the blanks there. And keep it friendly; no room for negative emotions in this company.
(Click through for a larger image. Full text description: a grid of rooms, 5 across by 3 down, with openings connecting all adjacent rooms, and openings in the outer walls in the northwest and southeast. Outside the northeast room is the word START and a blank recycling bin; outside the southeast room are four blanks. In each room is a recycling bin with a number; a large letter; and a smaller word or phrase. Reading from left to right, top to bottom, they are in order: +1/C/Dessert; -5/K/Skill; -8/J/Fastener; +7/T/Hair; +11/A/Salt Source; -6/I/Security; +5/L/Athlete; +13/O/Card; -2/M/Chess Term; +12/E/Dynasty; -11/N/Salt Source; -7/K/Connector; +10/G/Quirk; +6/P/Drink; +0/H/Appetizer.)
When you're done with your answer, be sure to drop it in the answer checker for proper disposal.
jazzfishdenise posting in dw_advocacyjadelennoxI am enjoying this Clarkesworld subscription. Snail mail once a month full of stories! And my favorite part of the subscription has been the recurring Morag and Seamus stories by Fiona Moore (all free online). I believe it's every one of her Clarkesworld stories from "The Spoil Heap" on. The list on the site is reverse chronological, so if you want to read in order, scroll down to "The Spoil Heap" and read up from there.
While very different, they remind me in vibe of Naomi Kritzer's "The Year Without Sunshine". One of my difficulties with some hopepunk is that it can ignore hard truths—which, I admit, is sometimes what I want! But like "The Year Without Sunshine", the Morag and Seamus stories don't pretend mutual aid can create Abundance™️, or outcompete bad and selfish actors, or defeat natural disasters, or solve medical and ability needs, or create entire post-scarcity planets or large societies where goodness reigns. In fact, the Morag and Seamus stories specifically roll their eyes at people who think we can achieve fully automated luxury gay space communism.
They're just about people (and possibly robots) figuring their shit out, in myriad ways. Some are helpers and some aren't; some make family in all kind of ways; nobody's sure what the future holds. Helpers beget helpers, greed begets problems, the world moves on, Morag and Seamus grow potatoes in Wales.
jadelennoxI was writing up a navel-gazing post about grief (tl;dr turned out I think "oh MM would like that!" more often than I would have suspected) and it somehow spiraled into how I could make beautiful and accessible no-Javascript footnotes CSS given the Dreamwidth CSS restrictions. This resulted in me, among other things, reading the DW codebase to see all the CSS restrictions, and then finally after a couple of hours getting my perfect CSS, even though it's completely useless because it will only work when reading in my journal style.
(ETA: That's only because I'm being a perfectionist about placement for the purposes of this exercise, and DW doesn't allow absolute positioning in inline HTML.)
(Also even making this post resulted in me reading the code for Perl's Text::Markdown since I couldn't remember which code block syntax it used.
Hyperfixation FTW!
( CSS, FWIW )
tahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 10: BANDdougo - Oscar 2025 pickstahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 9: WATERdougo - Best Picture thoughts, 2025 editionmark in dw_maintenance - Performing some traffic maintenance todaytahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 8: MYSTERYfauxklore - A Fairly Social Weektahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 7: WILDdenise in dw_advocacy - Update, Netchoice v Wilson (South Carolina): motion for preliminary injunction filedtahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 6: SOUNDfauxklore - Mostly Februarytahnan - Enigmarch 2026, Day 5: PATHjazzfish - tenor viola followupjazzfish - various session optionsdenise in dw_advocacy - The List of Shamejadelennox - short fiction rec: Morag and Seamus storiesjadelennox - ADHD with the knockout 🎉branchandroot
